Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners NAS unit ramble

I consume media it seems with a passion. I am also lazy and don't like getting up and sorting through my media to select a disc and then have to put it into the player etc....

So I burn everything over to my NAS unit so I can consume it when I would like it. So needless to say I am always hitting the wall when it comes to drive storage capacity.

If you do a search on the net, you will see a number of people who are converting older PC's into a DIY file server / NAS unit. The thought is that you have the older PC that is not being used and why not recycle. I as said before can be rather lazy and like the turn key solutions that you can get rather than constantly tinkering around with another box.

But I thought for the sake of bringing it up, there is one additional cost that is very easy to forget about. A PC takes considerably more power than many of the consumer/business class NAS units sold.

I ran out of drive space and took a couple of days cleaning up my drive to get rid of garbage files that are not used any more and will never really be required any time again. I re-looked at the get another larger unit vs DIY.

I have an old AMD X4 collecting dust that was setup for my wife in her office that hasn't been turned on in over 2.5 years now (she got a laptop and just uses that). So I looked into the FreeNAS software again to see if it's usability would make it a viable project. The new user interface is great and it does look quite good. But then I remembered a small gadget I have inside my work shop that measured power usage on a plug, so I plugged the AMD into the unit and it shows around 129watt of power running with a single hard drive inside it. Run that through the cost of power calculator that my electric company gives me, and that works out to around $175/year to run after taxes, sur-charges etc. By comparison, my 4 drive Synology NAS pulls 29watt (9watt in standby). So the difference in just power consumption as I don't access the NAS 24x7 works out to being in the $140/y more for the DIY project over the Synology.

Now, you need to break into the cost vs benefit side and add in the ever increasing cost of electricity it's now trying to gather if it's more cost effective to but a new unit, or to pay the power company to run a self built DIY unit.

That savings just got you another 2TB NAS!

I use a 1TB WD my cloud live for music and about 100 DVD rips. Works like a charm. The only failing point is an older version of twonky running on it. Pretty spiffy unit though.

Hmmmm...between you and Nick you guys are quickly becoming the go to guys for network media solutions. Expect nagging and helpless questions from me later! I'd love to have a NAS solution for BD rips at some point.